jun 8, 793 - Lindisfarne

Description:

On 8 June 793, the terrified inhabitants of the small Northumbrian island of Lindisfarne found themselves under attack. Norse longboats landed on the holy island with the intention of plundering its monastery’s riches. Treasures were stolen, religious relics destroyed and monks murdered, in a brutal and shocking start to centuries of Viking activity in Britain.

Anglo-Saxon monasteries made rich pickings for Viking raiders. The British Isles’ religious communities could offer little resistance to the plundering of their treasures. Furthermore, as pagans, the Viking attackers had no religious qualms about desecrating sacred sites.

Lindisfarne was not the first time Scandinavians had visited on the British Isles. While they had largely come to trade peacefully, there had been sporadic violence. In 789 three ships of Norsemen had landed on the coast of the kingdom of Wessex and murdered one of the king’s officials. Yet the merciless raid on Lindisfarne’s monastery was different – it was an unprecedented brutal strike right at the heart of Anglo-Saxon Christianity.

The shocking event spread fear and panic across Christian Europe. The scholar Alcuin argued that God, as vengeance on the immoral people of the kingdom of Northumbria, had sent the raiders. The attack was not easily forgotten. In the ninth century, Lindisfarne’s Anglo-Saxon residents memorialised the violence by carving the scenes of bloodshed onto a stone grave marker. The stone, now kept in Lindisfarne’s museum, is known as the ‘Viking Domesday Stone’.

Just as Christian communities had feared, Lindisfarne heralded the beginning of further death and destruction, as Viking raids on Britain escalated over the following years.

https://www.historyextra.com/period/viking/8-key-viking-dates-you-need-to-know/

Added to timeline:

Date:

Images:

Geo: